PARIS (JUNE 17, 2026)  — Shield AI, the U.S.  defense technology company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft , today signed a strategic integration partnership with Spain’s UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía, part of the Spanish multinational technology company Grupo Oesía and a specialist in guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) solutions for unmanned aerial vehicles. The partnership focuses on integrating Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software...

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based search to an intelligent research assistant capable of answering complex questions and drafting regulatory documents. more… One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have...

The sixth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 6, I chat with Cory , the author of coryd.dev . We talk about, among other things, the role of community in the indie web, a day in the life with his website, and music listening and community as it relates to personal websites. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Cory coryd.dev The sixth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is ou...

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B Qwen 3 MOE , as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder across a lot of different system setups like raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI llama-cpp-python Ollama llamafiles and LM Studio Where are local models now? Early on, models were slo...

People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most” under load 1 . The idea here is that once the AI bubble money drains away, current infrastructure will rapidly become obsolete, and there won’t be enough money floating around to buy a whole slate of brand-new GPUs. Inference costs would thus rapidly become way too expensive for current AI products to make any financial sense. Where does this “three years ...

I'm leaving New York this December for the research triangle area of North Carolina. I've considered leaving New York many times for the same reason: lower cost of living to help me start a company without needing to force myself into a VC route. And now with The Consensus I have a project that 1) I fully believe in and 2) is going pretty well, so it's time to extend my runway. It has been a joy meeting so many cool people in New York over the years attending and running meetups. (NYC Systems ...

“The Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice,” by Bernardo Bellotto, via the National Gallery of Art . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subs...

When I open a link, say on Hacker News, and I see a blog post or a GitHub README obviously written by AI, I feel a few things. I feel offended, because it’s like I’ve been tricked, like the author thinks I’m a rube who won’t notice or mind. I feel sad at how common this experience is, how many people are happy to dump their sewage on the commons and sign their name on it. And I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince wor...

So you know how we have the incubator setup? Well, unbeknownst to me, my wife gave one of our broody hens a cluch of Guinea fowl eggs to sit on a month ago . She just sent me this... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . So you know how we have the incubator setup? Well, unbek...

By 2030, technological, economic and demographic shifts will displace 92 million jobs and create 170 million, a net gain of 78 million worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum. This post covers automation adoption, market size, robot deployment, industry usage, and the job impact employers expect through 2030. Every figure below is dated 2024 or later. Workplace Automation Statistics 2026 — TL;DR 88% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year e...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Regulation Works How Change Happens Bibliography · Glossary What Has Actually Worked Alternatives to the dysfunctions described in this series of post exist. Ranked-choice voting...

At this year’s ECOOP, the Institute for System Software will be attending with the almost complete team and we’re going to present on a variety of topics. Come and talk to us at ICOOOLPS, MPLR, the Demo Track, DEBT, ECOOP Academy, and at the poster session! Below, a brief overview and when the talks are scheduled. Monday, June 29, 2pm: AOT Meta-Compilation of Dynamic Languages Towards Ahead-of-Time Meta-Compilation of Dynamic Languages With an Extensible Type Analysis Christop...

Suppose that you have a configuration file in JSON. Something like this: { "width" : 1920 , "height" : 1080 , "fullscreen" : true , "title" : "My Game" , "volume" : 0.8 } Normally you ship this file alongside your program, open it at startup, read it, and parse it. That is a lot of work for data that never changes. What if the file is fixed at build time? Could the compiler read it, parse it, and bake the result directly into the executable as a constant? Wit...

Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Univer...

Recently I came upon Pluggy , a Python library for developing plugin systems. It was originally developed as part of the pytest project - known for its rich plugin ecosystem - and later extracted into a standalone library. You're supposed to reach out for Pluggy if you want to add a plugin system to your tool or library and want to use something proven rather than rolling your own. In this post I will share some notes on how Pluggy works, and will then review how it aligns with the fundame...

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos . Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that situ...

Last week I saw a talk by Northwestern professor Nina Wieda on the history of the Silk Road , a network of trading routes across Asia active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. I knew of the Silk Road but was surprised by how much it used and fostered various technologies.  It started with a technology that allowed for traveling long distances with limited access to water, better known as a camel. Travel was slow, it could take nearly two years to get from one end (modern d...

A week or so ago, I posted about my currently ongoing fitness challenge where the goal was to go down from the almost 90kg I was weighing to below the oldest measurement I had on record, which was an 85.3kg. Side note: that’s the oldest but not the lowest, because I do have an 81kg on record, but that’s honestly not a healthy weight for me. I know that day-to-day weight can fluctuate considerably, I know that body composition changes a lot when you’re dieting, and I know that wei...

I might have mentioned before that I've been slowly working through the Simple tutorial for building a Sea of Nodes compiler. A lot of it is still sort of going over my head but I've learned a couple of interesting things in the process of working through it that I think I can bring back to a query planning context. One thing I learned from it is that my understanding of Hash Consing was a bit myopic. Or incomplete. I have always thought of hash consing as a way to turn value equality in...

This post was backdated, because we were in transit at the time. This was the last day of our Vietnam 2026 trip. While it couldn’t hold a candle to our journey last year that also took us to Hà Nội and Đà Lạt, it’s still the most fun week I’ve had in a long time. Vietnam is, in case you haven’t noticed by my posts by now, one of the most incredible places in the world. I know it’s easy for someone like me in Australia to get to, but even if you’re further away reading this...

The Artemis III crew on the announcement day. Image: NASA / Robert Markowitz On June 9, NASA announced an all-male crew for the upcoming Artemis III mission , which aims to dock the crew’s Orion spacecraft with prototype lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX in low Earth orbit to test several key systems and reduce risks ahead of a crewed Moon landing attempt with Artemis IV . The Artemis III crew comprises three NASA astronauts and one from ESA: Randy Bresnik , commander ESA astro...

The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News ) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783 ) directly to PyPI and install them at runtime. Previously, the Pyodide maintainers had to maintain, build, and host over 300 packages ourselves. This created a significant burden on our maintainers and became a major bottleneck for t...

In the previous post about 3D printing I wrote how amazed I was that I could just start printing, without any calibration, and the prints would be perfect each time. And that was true for a while, I went through the first roll of filament without any issues. But mid through the second roll, the prints started to lose quality, the corners were lifting up from the print bed, but still the print would finish and be acceptable, especially with things like Gridfinity, that are more usage and le...